PUPPIES.

An Ohiopyle dog had a litter of puppies a few months ago. A bunch of little labradors got dispersed around town. One puppy went home with Jared and Amanda, the awesome head yogis of Power Yoga Morgantown, one of them went with a student at WVU, and one of them stayed at home with its mom. The runt of the litter ended up with an enormous bearded guy named Grizz, who lives at the White House with Montana. He named her Ursus, the bear.

She is devastatingly cute.

I'm not sure if Grizz thought this one out. He works days. And nights. Meanwhile, Ursa stays in her cage, waiting for him to come back and causing an ungodly ruckus when anyone walks into the house.

So Montana and I have been taking care of her during the day. Mostly to keep her from peeing all over the floor.

The other day we took her on a hike. It took some wrangling, but we eventually got her onto the leash.

 But of course, we had to stop for a play break.

 Before we finally got to the trail.

It was a beautiful day--one of the few days of winter sunshine we'll get all year in Pennsylvania. Ursa loved exploring all the new things in the woods.

Yum.

 It was a nice hike, but unfortunately we had to take her back home to Grizz.

As much as we'd like to have a dog, both of us think a puppy needs more stable people to take care of it. Someone trying to raise a puppy probably needs to be home for at least a few hours every day to give it some exercise and make sure it doesn't rip apart every sock in the house and pee all over the floor.

Sigh.

things we do in Colorado

This year I only took one picture in Boulder. I really had a fancy for this bicycle covered in plastic flowers. I'd ride one like this if the stems wouldn't get stuck in the spokes and make the cranks seize up. Some things are more whimsical than functional, I guess. Among other things we saw in Boulder: contortionists, trustafarians, pro cyclists, and thunderstorms. Apparently it storms every afternoon on the front range in August - which we found out when we got trapped in a monsoon under a bathroom awning at the bike park.

After a couple days we decided to get out of Boulder to suffocate ourselves at higher altitudes. We drove away from Winter Park wheezing and then found this terrific mountain pass.

It dropped us out somewhere in San Isabel National Forest, which seemed like a perfect place to get a flat tire before we carried on to Salida.

Salida was neat. Lots of fun desertish riding, a random classic car show in the center of town, and surprisingly good thai food.

After fiddling about with the flat tire for 24 more hours, Montana finally relented and got it fixed at an actual tire shop - for free. It seems that common sense takes a long time to break through the male ego. Then we drove back up to the mountains to ride a few miles of the Monarch Crest trail.

A ride at 12,000 feet was a little scary - mainly because I couldn't breathe. Otherwise, it was totally awesome. The trail was mostly super-buff and basically flat along the ridgeline. Surprisingly easy riding for someone who's only been riding a bike for a week. And the new bike's pretty terrific. I can't believe I wasted 2 years of my life dragging my boat-anchor Karate Monkey up hills and trying to tell myself it was fun.

Then on to Crested Butte. Scenic views abound and I struggled up those hills on an 8-mile run.

And this guy from Alabama who camped next to us.

We left Butte, drove about 30,000 miles of gravel road to Redstone (a tiny town with no cell phone service and only one public payphone), miscommunicated with our boss who had offered us a place to stay for the night, and ended up camping in the red cliffs outside of town. Then on to Fruita.

I love Fruita, and I love the riding there. But apparently 1:30 in the afternoon is too late to go for a bike ride if you're not into becoming a bleached animal carcass on the side of the Kokopelli Trail.

My friend Anna and me, in the very hot shade underneath a 500-year-old tree that's probably sick of being in the sun for so long.

Out of the hot desert and finally up and over Independence Pass to Breckenridge, because Montana had to do that race and stuff. We're staying in a condo with 11 other middle-aged mountain bikers who are also in the race. One of them thought it would be brilliant to trudge up a mountain two days before it started. We got really tired and saw a family of mountain goats. Boyfriend's report about it here.

Good stuff. Everyone was really sore and bitchy for the next two days. 

Then the race started, and good times were had by all, especially on the second day.

Watch more video of 2012 Breck Epic Stage Race on cyclingdirt.org

I've been running around the trails in Breck and attempting to help out at aid stations, but on the hypothermia day I stood in the rain at the finish line with coffee and a warm sweater for Montana so he wouldn't die. That hot tub is a quite literally a life saver.

In a few days the race will be over and we'll have to leave Colorado and drive all the way back to Ohio. I'm a little sad about that. But I'm drowning in testosterone here, and I can't wait to be reunited with my lovely cross country ladies.

feeling beachy

Even though people keep talking about how it's winter here, I don't believe them. Besides the chilly wind, I'm in full-on summer mode. Classes are over, the sun's out, and I've been hanging out at beaches. 

I spent the past couple weekends on the Wellington's rocky coast. It's not such a great spot for tea parties, because the wind blows the lettuce off your sandwiches and makes the tea go cold really quickly.

(Thank goodness chocolate's too heavy to blow away)

But it is a terrific spot for taking pictures...

and going on hikes to see the Red Rocks again...

saying hello to the South Island...

eating at nautical-themed cafés...

and climbing around on rocks.

If you take a short ferry trip across Wellington's harbor, you can even go hang out on a tiny island for the day.

 Provided you agree to some manual labor

and bring along a pair of fuzzy glittens.

But tomorrow I'm off to see some real beaches (by myself - eep! - because everybody else is busy taking finals or going to Australia with their parents).

I've booked a few bus tickets to go around the Northernmost tip of New Zealand - creatively dubbed Northland and supposedly the warmest, driest part of the country. I'm flying in to Auckland tomorrow and heading to Paihia, Raglan, and the Coromandel from there. My bag's all packed and ready to go - with a raincoat and a fuzzy hat shoved inside just in case.

part 4: Kepler Track

After Queenstown Lauren and I caught a bus further south to Te Anau, a little town at the edge of Fiordland National Park. We heaved our food-laden packs onto our backs. Then we set off into the wild. Sort of.

The Kepler is one of NZ's Great Walks - a manicured 40-mile trail up a mountain, along the ridge, and down through the bush. The trail is perfectly clear, and the alpine section even has stairs and handrails. The Department of Conservation offers 3 huts along the way with running water, mattresses, and gas stoves. It's not exactly roughing it.

We'd booked all the huts a few months in advance. But soon we realized that we probably could have done the whole track in three days instead of four. Each day we started at 9:00 and reached the next hut at around 2:00 with plenty of time to sit around and scratch our sandfly bites.

Still. That's not to say that the experience wasn't astoundingly beautiful.

We had amazing weather at the first hut, which sits up above the town of Te Anau.

We did some casual caving that night.

At this point, we realized we should've packed matches and hiking-friendly food. The fresh carrots and canned tuna seemed like such a good idea at the beginning. But they turned out to be really heavy and smelly. Thankfully our packs got lighter as we got down to eating. And there were lots of friendly Germans on the trail who were willing to share their matches.

We had a fantastic sunrise view the next morning. I took at least twenty thousand pictures of it.

Then we headed off to walk the alpine section in mystical fog.

I wore those compression tights for four days. Not a good idea.

The next two days were an easy downhill walk through the bush back to town.

The last hut was on the side of another ridiculously lovely NZ lake, where we attempted to wash some grime off ourselves.

And the next day we stumbled back into the civilized world (aka: where you can buy cake).

It was a pretty good time. 

Part 3: Queenstown

When you talk to other tourists in NZ, Queenstown is like a point on a pilgrimage road - some kind of Holy Land of outdoor activity that might hold Sir Edmund Hilary's ashes inside a quad helmet. Everyone's going to Queenstown. Or they're on their way home, and they're broke. 

Considering the hype, I was pleasantly surprised at how small it was. Downtown Queenstown is a half-mile grid of a few busy streets packed with cafés and outdoor shops snuggled up against sapphire-blue Lake Wakitipu. Sailboats and jetboats cavort around the harbor. There's a brick walkway full of street performers along the lakeside where tourists in hiking packs wander around with ice cream cones. At the edge of town there's a botanical garden on the peninsula with a limestone walking path that extends out to the airport. People are relaxed and smiling - even the tourist-harassed café workers and bike shop guys. It felt like a Colorado ski resort town without as many pretentious Americans. 

Gold and green mountains jut up around the city. Five minutes from downtown there's a network of pristine hiking trails so fantastic it's stupid (you can even get to the famous Routeburn track). Most of the hiking trails are mountain-bike-friendly, there's a freeride park hidden in the woods east of town, and a gondola that takes a bunch of smelly downhillers to the top of a big hill so they can show off their baggy shorts to tourists. Paragliders jump off the top of the gondola hill and float into town.

A couple hours' drive away are historic Arrowtown, Lake Wanaka, Mount Aspiring, and Fiordland National Park - home to some of New Zealand's most stunning scenery and awesome, accessible hiking.

I was smitten.

Lauren and I spent four days hanging there out to recover from the bus trip. We did a lot of eating. On the first day, we met up with our program advisor Jane - a Queenstown native - at a fantastic ice cream place on the water. We bought groceries at the supermarket and luxuriated in being able to use the hostel fridge. We sampled a more few cafés, went on a bar tour, and ate at the famous Fergburger.

Trevor and Lauren had something called the "Mr. Big Stuff" - a half pound of beef with bacon and cheese. My single-patty brie cheeseburger and its gluten free bun looked a little malnourished in comparison. 

I hadn't had a good burger in New Zealand. Their beef tends to taste a bit different, maybe because NZ cows eat cleaner grass. But I can attest that those burgers were pretty damn awesome. I also realize now that getting a diet Coke with a burger the size of my head was a pretty dumb idea. 

To offset all the eating and alcohol consumption, we walked up the hill by the gondola and watched grown men giggle to themselves on the luge track. 

I also ran around town every day. One of my favorite runs was the Queenstown Hill Time Track. 

It starts outside of town close to the hostel where we stayed. The track switches back and forth through the pines and opens up on a high point where the trees and hills cancel out the noises of the town.   A couple vagrant Merinos had been grazing in the grass when I ran up, but they'd moved on when Lauren and I hiked up later to take pictures. 

Criminy. This place is awesome. 

In retrospect we didn't take advantage of Queenstown. We didn't go Bungy jumping, skydiving, canyoning, fish-feeding, zoo visiting, jetboating, golfing, horseback riding, whitewater rafting, or kayaking (I can do those for free at home). I never got around to doing any bike riding since nobody else was keen on going with me. 

But that's okay with me. I didn't end up broke, and Lauren and I were well-rested and well-fed on the fifth day when we got up at 5:30 to start our long walk on the Kepler Track. 

I do plan to go back to Queenstown sometime, provided it's not too snowy in June. In that case, maybe I'll rent some skis.